From our class in the Library Lab we got the usual lecture on searching the internet. Usually I go at it as to just find what I need as easily as possible. This time though I looked at it differently and I think a great deal of that is credited from the book I’m reading for my book report, “The World Is Flat”.
We think about the internet and it’s such a large database of information, babble, and nonsense. Every time I have to do research for a paper I run into the issue of sifting the meaningful from the meaningless. My book talks about the internet and how with so much information in one place the world is a much more level playing field because more and more people can access it. The beauty of the internet is also its biggest problem, how to access what you need and what you need alone. This is one of things that I got out of my book so far is that in order for the world to continue to flatten, there needs to be ways of searching the internet and finding what you need from a reliable source, say a scholarly journal for instance.
Enter Aaron Dobbs, many see him as a simple librarian but, after connecting the lessons in my book to him, I see him as a flattener of our world. Look at what he did just for our class. He set up a site where we could access certain databases of information narrowed down to the business sector. Every angle we needed to hit was readily available by the simple click of a tab or link on his site which saves me a substantial amount of time. He had database after database where the outside topics of “nonsense” could be eliminated from our search. This made searching the internet much less frustrating and time could be made more efficient by getting to the meat of the information out there. The key to flattening the world is to make information easily and efficiently accessible and at the same time get only the information you are looking for.
So, thanks to the database companies and Aaron Dobbs for being together responsible for the flattening of the world and making the internet a much more user friendly place to conduct research. I mean without these innovators we’d still be searching through pages and pages on Google looking for “scholarly journals”.
This is a very interesting way to look at it. I often think about the idea that the larger the internet becomes the more difficult it will be to access the information we desire. I have noticed it even in the last few years when I google something it often has a large stretch of things on the first page as compared to when I first started using the internet. Aaron was helpful, and thank God for people like him. It amazes me that the internet is so complex. I am technologically incompetent so it amazes me even more that there are people who can understand search engines so completely as to alter and manipulate them.
ReplyDeleteI never would have thought that the internet could do something like "flatten" the world, but I guess it makes sense when you think about. Even as a college junior I have a hard time going through the internet finding good information to put in my papers. However with the right guidance and training, it would be an invaluable resource to people all over the world. I like the idea that we are spreading knowledge to places and people that have not had it as long as we have. It means more minds working on the same projects which means more innovative and quicker solutions.
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